The following are examples of link schemes which can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results:

Buying or selling links that pass PageRank. This includes exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links; exchanging goods or services for links; or sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link

So what’s the current state of play with link buying?

Editor’s note

If you get caught buying links to improve rankings, Google may penalise your site. We do not recommend buying links, but if you do, then understand the risks.

Disguised PBNs: They sell their service as real outreach, but they actually use PBNs. You can usually tell these services a mile off, as they’re very cheap (<$100 per post). We don’t recommend using them unless you’re aware of, and accept, the risks associated with PBNs.

Intermediary link buyers/sellers: They pay sites for inclusion on behalf of their clients, markup the price, then pocket the difference. Essentially, they’re middlemen (or women) in the link buying/selling process.

I’d say #3 is the most common.

We get requests from intermediary link buyers/sellers (#3) at Ahrefs all the time.

Here’s an example:

We once even had one guy who was contacting all our previous contributors to try and sneakily buy a backlink on the blog.

Here’s Tim, quite rightly, trolling that guy:

I don’t think we heard back from him after that!

But the thing is…

If he’d just taken the time to write a top quality guest post instead, we would have probably accepted it. He would then have picked up a link for free!

Buying Links from Bloggers

This is where I believe the bulk of link buying and selling takes place in 2018.

That’s private link purchases from bloggers.

I have a couple of blogs and I get these kinds of requests all the time.

(I don’t sell links btw!)

But, it isn’t always a monetary exchange.

Sometimes it’s more of a bribe, where a product is offered in exchange for a “genuine” review on the blogger’s site.

It goes without saying that the review will contain a natural-looking in-content backlink.

This is generally the mutual unspoken agreement between blogger and link builder.

And the thing is, for Google, these links (bought or bribed) are pretty undetectable.

How can they tell if a link from within a piece of editorial content has been paid for?

The answer is, they can’t.

Flipping this round, have you ever sent an outreach email and received a response like this?

I’m seeing it more and more (note: keep reading for the study on this!)

Many bloggers are well aware of the value of a backlink and are now openly asking for payment.

Which kind of sucks.

But, that’s business I guess.

So just how much private link buying and selling goes on? And what’s the average cost of a link?

Let’s find out.

What Percentage Of Blogs Are Selling Links in 2018? (and How Does This Compare to 2016?)

For this study, I reached out to 450 sites across 9 competitive niches (i.e. 50 sites in each).

Here are the niches:

Travel

Fashion

Fitness

Finance

Weddings

Photography

Food

Parenting

Marketing

And here is the email I sent:

As you can see, there was no messing about. I got straight to the point.

I wanted to buy a link on their site and I wanted to know how much it would be.

Sidenote.

We conducted the same study in 2016, only with fewer sites in fewer niches (250 sites across 5 niches: travel, fashion, fitness, finance, weddings). I used the exact same email outreach template this year as we did in 2016. I’ve included a comparison of the results from both studies below.

Here are the results:

Total Number of Blogs Selling Links

Firstly, let’s take a look at the overall totals:

Sell links: 54

Don’t sell links: 38

No response: 338

Bounces: 20

Here’s how these numbers compare to 2016:

As you can see in the chart above, only 12.6% of the sites I reached out to agreed to sell me a link, compared to 18.4% in 2016.

Still, it’s quite a high hit rate.

Sidenote.

I won’t be “outing” any of the sites who were selling links. That’s not what this study was about.

But as you will see in a moment, the data is skewed somewhat by one of the niches.

Total Number of Blogs Selling Links by Niche

Now let’s break it down by niche.

Travel: 22

Fitness: 7

Fashion: 0

Finance: 3

Wedding: 2

Photography: 7

Food: 3

Parenting: 7

Marketing: 3

Again, here’s how this compares to 2016:

As you can see, travel was by far the biggest niche selling links. A whopping 44% of the 50 sites I contacted agreed to sell me a link.

We noticed a similar trend in 2016, too.

Sidenote.

6 of the sites stipulated that the link would be “nofollow”.

This makes sense considering the value of the travel industry.

It would also suggest that a considerable part of commercial travel sites are buying links (supply and demand).

Now let’s take a look at the actual cost of buying the links.

What is the Cost of Buying a Link Outright in 2018?

There was a big variation in the price of buying the links.

The cheapest quote was $50. That link was from a parenting blog with a Domain Rating (DR) of 32.

The most expensive quote was £2,500 ($3,312) per year. That came from a DR56 travel blog.

You can see that things look much more “normal” with the new DR score—we now have a few websites in the DR0-19 range selling links.

Before, too many domains were clustered in the DR30-49 range.

This is one of the issues we solved with our new DR metric.

Joshua Hardwick

Head of Content

That’s a pretty powerful selection of links right there.

I’m guessing this would definitely move the needle.

Sidenote.

I did not reach out to an even split of sites by Domain Rating, so this should not be taken as an indication that sites with DR 50–59 are more likely to sell links. I used lists of “top blogs” in the niches to select sites.

But, here’s another question: does the average cost of a link increase in line with DR?

You can see that, once again, things looks a lot more “normal” with the new DR score.

There were previously no domains selling links in the DR0-29 range, which didn’t really make sense.

And aside from the slight dip in the DR30-39 range (which was most likely caused by varying amounts of data between each DR “bucket”), there’s still a clear correlation between DR and the cost of a link.

Joshua Hardwick

Head of Content

So, that’s how much a link costs when you actually ask to buy one.

But what about when you don’t?

How Many Bloggers Charge for Guest Posts in 2018? (And How Much Do They Charge?)

Have you ever pitched a guest post idea and received a response like this?…

I know I have. It happens all the time.

So, I thought it would be interesting to run another small study to find out:

How often this actually happens;

How much these paid guest posts typically cost.

Here’s what I did:

I reached out to 180 blogs across the same 9 niches (i.e. 20 per niche) with this email:

As you can see, I didn’t mention payment of any kind in the email itself.

Sidenote.

I only pitched blogs that were openly accepting (and looking for) guest posts. This means they each had a “write for us” page, or something similar.

Here are the results:

Total Number of Blogs Charging for Guest Posts

First, let’s take a look at the overall stats:

Didn’t ask for money: 22

Did ask for money: 24

No response: 134

Over half (52%) of responses asked for money!

I don’t know about you, but I found that number to be surprisingly high.

But what about when broken down by niche?

Total Number of Blogs Charging for Guest Posts by Niche

Here are the results:

Finance blogs took the lead here, with 31% of bloggers (i.e. almost 1 in 3) asking for money in exchange for a guest post.

Or dealing with the inevitable feeling of rejection when most prospects never reply.

No. It’s a simple value exchange—a rarity in the murky world of link-building.

But, unfortunately, there are two big reasons why buying links isn’t the best idea:

1. You Can Effectively Buy Links for Much, Much Less

$361.44 isn’t cheap.

And remember, most websites won’t rank with a single link.

That burns through money pretty fast.

But here’s the thing: in a sense, every link is a paid link, even those built from “natural” outreach.

Why? Because outreach takes time. And time = money.

In other words, you could send a blogger $360+ and have done with it (i.e. buying a link outright). Or you could spend time and effort building relationships with bloggers to try to earn a link “naturally”.

Either way, it still costs money because your time (or the time of the person you’ve hired to build links) isn’t free.

Let’s look at the figures…

It costs $360+, on average, to buy a link outright.

That’s definitely one option.

But, let’s say that you paid someone $50/hour to build links for you via outreach.

If they only built 1 link every 7 hours (on average), it would still be cheaper than buying links outright.

Even the worst link builder could surely manage this.

2. Paid Links Can Be Very Low-quality

Let’s say a blogger agrees to sell you a link.

Do you think you’re the only one?

Or do you think they’re selling links to other link-builders, too?

Most of the time, it’s going to be the latter.

Here’s why this isn’t good:

If a site accepts links based not on merit, but cold hard cash, they’ll likely end up linking to a lot of unrelated junk.

This puts your link in a questionable “link neighbourhood”.

In layman’s terms, this is akin to hanging around with bad influences (i.e. the people your mum told you not to talk to). You’re lumped into the same questionable crowd by the power of association.